Making the Early Modern: Renaissance Adaptations and Afterlives

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Mass surveillance, the curation of a public profile, monstrous bonds between creator and creation—What can early modern literature tell us about dystopian fiction and 1960s neo-noir crime film? Beginning with a dialogue between John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, our class will ask what it means to tell and retell a story. We’ll consider Shakespearean drama and 17th-century manuscripts alongside Julia Child’s cookbooks and the 90s rom-com, ending with a search for fragments of Thomas More’s Utopia in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.